I am in the planning and ordering stages for my ESXi installation. I currently have purchased two Dell 2950 servers and a SAN device for virtualizing my current network of 8 servers. My quest...
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I am in the planning and ordering stages for my ESXi installation. I currently have purchased two Dell 2950 servers and a SAN device for virtualizing my current network of 8 servers. My question is what additional hardware will be needed to complete this infrastructure according to best practices? I currently only have one 48 port gig switch in my network. I have been reading that a physical switch is needed for the network and VMs, one for only SAN traffic, and one for ESXi management traffic with each one of these being on their own subnet. Is this right? Also, I have been reading that it is good to have at least two NICs for each of these on the host servers for at least a total of six NICs on each host server. Can anyone provide some insight as to how all this should be designed? I have a pretty good idea but I would love some feedback about what others are doing. I want this to be as basic a setup as possible but with hardware redundancy! We are a very small business just trying to virtualize our 8 servers with more on the way. If there are any links of interest concerning this that would be appreciated as well. thanks!